Processing of meat for human consumption includes the characterization of meat tenderness, which is performed for the purpose of grading the meat. Tenderness may be characterized by assessing parameters that affect sensory properties, such as toughness, juiciness, firmness, mealiness, stringiness, chewiness, hardness, softness. These parameters are typically assessed subjectively, such as by having a panel of human subjects taste the meat and perform a diagnostic sensory analysis of the meat.
While diagnostic sensory characterization is acceptable, it is nevertheless problematic because the meat samples must be prepared and human subjects must test a large number of samples. Mechanized methods of estimating meat tenderness may be used instead of diagnostic sensory characterization.
One mechanized method of meat characterization is the Warner-Bratzler shear press, which measures the shear force required to cut a meat sample. Although this method is more convenient than diagnostic sensory characterization, the correlation between diagnostic sensory characterization and the Warner-Bratzler shear force measurements is typically low, ranging from 40 percent to 60 percent.
Because of the difficulty and cost associated with diagnostic sensory characterization, and the low correlation between known mechanized methods of estimating and diagnostic sensory characterization, these methods are not used. Instead, the predominant standard method for grading meat is the United States Department of Agriculture beef quality grading system, which is a subjective evaluation that ranks beef according to the amount of marbling and the maturity of the animal. Other methods are not used because of the prohibitive costs of such methods or the low accuracy of such methods.